


Cast All Memory (Of Me) From Your Mind

by DestielsDestiny



Category: Murder Rooms: The Dark Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes
Genre: Bamf Bell, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Family Feels, Father-Son Relationship, Friendship, Gen, Hopeful Ending, Hurt Bell, Hurt Doyle, Hurt/Comfort, Kid Fic, Memories, Misunderstandings, Post-Canon, Post-Canon Fix-It, Slight graphic content in one sentence, Some descriptions of canon typical violence, The White Knight Stratagem, Yuletide Treat, sorta - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-25
Updated: 2017-12-25
Packaged: 2019-02-20 04:07:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13138743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DestielsDestiny/pseuds/DestielsDestiny
Summary: Arthur’s shoes are in the process of slowly dissolving when he catches the Doctor’s expression at long last. He has scarcely ever seen such devastation. His breath catches of its own painful volition.Not least because almost a year has elapsed since the Doctor last looked at him at all.





	Cast All Memory (Of Me) From Your Mind

**Author's Note:**

  * For [plumedy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/plumedy/gifts).



> AN: For Plumedy, Yuletide 2017. Based on their prompt request for a post series reunion story.  
> It should be noted that my explanation for where Warner lives is rather garbled. Also, I know next to nothing about cricket.

The door above their heads splintered ever inward, Bell’s arm snaking across Arthur’s front to press him yet further into the cold morgue tiles. 

“Doctor.” Arthur feels his voice is remarkably calm for a man whose socks are currently being dissolved by the highly corrosive acid they are perched on a morgue table in a somewhat belated attempt to avoid. 

A look of yet deeper desolation sweeps across the Doctor’s face anyway, his eyes studiously avoiding his protégé’s gaze. And damn if that does not sting more swift and deep than the skin on his feet bubbling into thick blisters with every passing drip of acid. 

“Doctor.” Arthur tries again, vainly seeking to capture Bell’s eyes without leaning too far forwards from their makeshift perch. The outer door is almost broken through in several places by now. 

Bell has never been a quiet man. Introspective, thoughtful, deliberate in word and speech as he is in action, certainly. Verbose, certainly not. But quiet? Never, in Doyle’s not inconsiderable experience. 

Thus, his lack of speech burns all the deeper in this moment. “Joe!” 

For a moment, even the hammering seems to pause, for all that Doyle’s utterance was more whisper than shout. He has never addressed the doctor so informally before, would never dare to. 

But it has been a very long year, and Doyle is having a very bad day. 

And it has the desired effect, Bell’s chest visibly seizing as he finally, finally opens his mouth to acknowledge his former protégé is even there. 

“What is it Doyle?” There…are many potential responses to that. A great many. In the interests of disguising their precarious position to their unknown assailants, Arthur refrains from voicing any of them. 

Instead, he swallows against the pain in his feet, and flops his head against Bell’s shoulder. 

“Doctor, my feet hurt.” It was a childish thing to say, utterly childish. But then, something about Bell has always made Arthur feel rather like a child. Open, vulnerable, raw, as if he was forever a frozen boy of seventeen, angry and embarrassed before his chums in a lecture hall packed to the rafters. 

No response was forthcoming, to Doyle’s utter lack of astonishment. But then a long fingered hand snakes around his shoulder with infinite care, a firm squeeze bleeding warmth into his bunched muscles. Doyle holds his breath as the Doctor’s hand travels from his shoulder to his head, ruffling through his hair for a brief moment, before cinching back around his middle in a firm, protective clasp. 

There is something about Joseph Bell that has always made Arthur Doyle feel rather like a child, from the very first moment. Open, vulnerable, raw, yes. 

But also so very, very safe. 

And he prays that that, more than anything, that never changes. 

00

Arthur had found himself liking Daniel Blaney upon first acquaintance. That was part of the trouble. That in the beginning, despite the doctor’s account of events, despite Bell’s judgement having never faltered or led him astray, despite the years between them, the affection, the trust, he had still hesitated. Hesitated to believe Bell. To trust him on faith. 

All because the first time he met a random police Inspector, he liked him. 

The guilt of that stayed with Arthur for a long time, even as he pretended all along that it was a rouse, that the entire time, he had known something wasn’t right. 

And yes, yes, that was true for much of the time. But not for all of it. 

The sound of the gun clicking back, the bullet tearing through brain matter, the skull blasting out, the body hitting the ground. That stays with him for a long time as well, in his nightmares. 

It was not his first dead body. It was not his first suicide. It was not even the first time he’d witnessed someone shooting themselves in the head. But somehow, he can’t quite get the sound to stop wringing in his ears, over and over and over. 

And every time he goes to write to Bell, he glances up and there, impossibly, are the cold, dead eyes of Daniel Blaney. 

Arthur had not told Blaney about his father’s illness, nor his incarceration in a “mad house.” Somehow, he had not had to. There was a part of Blaney that seemed to understand somehow, instinctively, because he had lived through the same hell. Because he was still living through it. Looking into the eyes of his loved one, and seeing nothing but a shadow of their former self reflected back. 

They only spoke of it once, the second evening Blaney trusted Doyle enough to take him back to his house, where Isadora resided, guarded and shut away. By that time, Arthur’s suspicions were long past aroused, and he found himself watching Blaney’s every move like a hawk. 

He found himself looking at the man, at the way he closeted and guarded his invalid wife, and it was not admiration he felt. 

Blaney held out a drink to him, his hand rock steady, more water than scotch, and spoke in that soft cadence of his. 

“You must miss them doctor.” Arthur felt his fingers slip against the glass ineffectually, watched it fall to the floor with a clang. Blaney seemed not to notice, his eyes rather like a snake’s as it stalked its pray. 

“Pardon?” Blaney quirked a sardonic eyebrow. “Oh come now doctor Doyle, surely you will not protest ignorance of what I speak,” He glanced at the closed study door, his eyes sad. “I see it in the way you look at Isadora. I can see that you, you understand.” Unlike Bell. Arthur could hear it, as plain as if it had been shouted. 

Ice slid down his spine, as it always did when the doctor was criticized in his presence, even obliquely. And even though it might destroy everything he was trying to accomplish, everything he was risking his entire relationship of trust and respect with the doctor to try to understand, to prove, Arthur could only allow his loyalty to be bent so far. 

“I’m afraid I don't know of what you speak Inspector.” Blaney actually laughed at that, mean and sarcastic, and fell gracefully into the chair opposite Doyle. 

“Really doctor, considering your loyalty to the man, anyone would think Bell was your father.” 

The snake gaze was back, for a brief moment, and then the floorboards creaked outside, and the moment was lost. Arthur let it slip away with immense gratefulness. 

Because a small, traitorous part of him agreed somehow. Bell was not his father. 

So why then was he more terrified of losing Bell than he was at the loss of his own father, his real father? 

Arthur does not let himself contemplate that any further, never has and never will. 

There are some things he refuses to bend on, some things he simply will not risk, where his relationship with the doctor is concerned. 

Trouble is, that even with Daniel Blaney dead and buried, his ghost does not seem to want to let Doyle rest. 

As if somehow, even from beyond the grave, he has managed to spoil something precious and sacred. 

As if, with a single bullet, he stole the doctor from Doyle. 

And left Arthur without the faintest idea how to get him back. 

00

Arthur had not seen it coming, the silence. On reflection, perhaps he should have. All the signs were there. But Doyle is no Bell, no matter the amount of time spent under the man’s tutelage. 

And after Blaney, Arthur is fine with that. He has seen first hand what even a shadow of the Doctor’s brand of genius can do to a mind that is not as wrapped in compassion as Joe Bell’s. And Arthur has no such illusions about the state of his own soul. Thus, he leaves the genius to the doctor, as it should be. 

And so, he does not see it coming. 

Not in the first few weeks, when he pens draft upon draft of a letter he seems unable to send. Not on the doctor’s birthday, when he hesitates outside the telegraph office for nearly three quarters of an hour, finally leaving without every crossing the threshold. 

Not when Innes returns to their mother in Edinburgh, his pockets free of missives, his eyes thoughtful and worried. 

Not when he stumbles home, more than slightly inebriated, knuckles split and lip fattening, and realizes it has been six months to the day since Daniel Blaney shot himself. 

Not even on the Anniversary, the seventh, each year weighing on him like a millstone, the lack of their usual visit to that accursed beach burning hot and acrid in Arthur’s throat, long after the date has come and gone. 

And so, Arthur Doyle does not see Bell’s silence coming. But nor does he begrudge it. After all, it is not as if he is fairing any better. Or trying any harder.  
Because every time he takes up his pen to write to the doctor, he hears his father’s angry shouts, and remembers that it has been an equally long time since he has seen his own father, his true father, as it has been since he saw or spoke to Joseph Bell. 

And each time, every time, Arthur’s throat closes on the certainty that he only, truly, misses one of those men. 

And that is it not the one he should. 

00

It is a case that reunites them, in the end. 

The irony is not lost on Doyle, all these months later, the doctor’s final exhortation echoing in his head, as clear now as it was then. 

But Warner’s note was rather short on detail, barely even a telegram really. 

Urgent. Concerns Bell. Come at Once. 

He was on the first train to Edinburgh. 

00

Arthur makes it half way through a letter to Bell once, some four months after their last meeting. 

It begins as it always does, Dear Doctor Bell. 

Two dozen lines in or more, his hand cramps, ink dripping through the scratched and torn paper. His hands are shaking with tension. 

Arthur has spent the better part of a decade following Bell further and further down the rabbit hole of crime and intrigue that their inquiries offer in abundant measure, but nothing has ever distressed him as this last case did. 

Somehow, not even their first. 

That letter ends its days the same way all the others have, balled up and lobed at the fireplace, to serve as tinder on dark, cold nights. 

Arthur tells himself it was too ink stained to ever send, but that is not the true reason. 

It is more the fact that if he sends it, he will be forced to finally think about it. If he sends it, it will be real. If he sends it, and receives no reply, then the rejection, the silence, won’t just exist in his head, and his heart. 

He tosses the letter away unfinished, because to do anything else, would mean that it was all real. 

Because it would mean that the doctor truly had forgotten him. 

That he truly did not care.

00

The lecture hall was packed. It was shortly after midday, and if Doyle remembered anything from his own student days, at least the third lecture of the day in this particular hall. 

And yet still, his shortness of breath had little to do with the hot, close air rushing about the room in stagnant wafts.

It had been close on a twelve month since he had laid eyes on the doctor, and while the passage of time had done nothing to soften his recollection of the man’s stern features and shrewd eyes, as indeed he suspected nothing ever could, there was a nervousness, an insecurity resting in his throat, of the kind he had not experienced since he truly was a student, hanging on Bell’s every word, banging from murder scene to murder scene after the man like a depressed puppy, half out of his mind with grief, half still brimming with all the enthusiasm of youth. 

To the students around him no doubt, the doctor appeared as ancient as the oaken rafters, and just as eternal. Yet to Doyle’s practiced eye, it seemed there was a slight lag in the man’s once sure gait, a slight stoop in those noble shoulders. 

The man looked, in fact, utterly unaltered since the last time they were in each other’s company. Arthur felt his heart seize with his worst fears and insecurities seeming to be realized, the ones he had scarce even dared to whisper to himself in the darkest and coldest of nights: what if the doctor truly was avoiding him because he forgotten, or worse yet, because he had never shared Arthur’s sincere regard for their partnership in the first place. Or what if, worst of all possibilities, Bell was ill, and wished to spare Doyle watching another father wither away before his eyes…

Arthur could not help his in-drawn breath at the last thought, previously never fully formed in his brain, and the realization he had utterly lost track of the goings on in the hall was brought into sharp relief at the dead silence that surrounded him. 

Arthur raised his head slowly and yes, sure enough, there were Bell’s storm grey eyes, as flat and cold and shrewd as they had been nearly eight years before, in this same hall. 

Their eyes met for a long moment, the silence stretching into an uncomfortable intensity. Doyle swallowed a lump in his throat, and held firm. He may have spent months failing to so much as finish a letter to the doctor, but he would be damned more than he suspected he already was for Elsbeth and Neil before he flinched first. 

Arthur had lost far too many people in his life to the cruelty of fate to let one of the most important slip out of his life out of apathy. 

Then the unthinkable happened: the doctor yielded first, his gaze sliding away from Arthur as if pulled by some unseen force, his voice picking up the cadence of the lecture as if he had never even paused. 

Doyle’s breath slams from his lungs in a pained gasp, and he is far from subtle in his frantic dash from the room, but no footsteps follow him, even as he slides to the floor of the corridor, shaking like a leaf, Bell’s apparent disregard stabbing into him like a knife repeatedly thrust into his gut. 

Then, remembering between gulps of air the telegram, the slight stoop of those proud shoulders, his vow of moments before, Arthur finds the strength to lurch from the ground, and stumble an unsteady but long familiar course to Bell’s private lab. 

The doctor always returned there after one of his lectures, and Doyle prays that the man’s desire to avoid him is not quite as strong as the force of his formidable love of routine. 

Less than a quarter of an hour later, acid sizzling through his socks and shouts flying in his ears, Arthur had much cause to regret not listening to Inspector Warner more closely when he’s briefed him about the doctor’s latest case-something about gun running perhaps?- only hearing as he did the particulars of the threats again Bell’s person. 

But even as the skin began to melt from his heels, Arthur could not find it within himself to regret being proven right about the doctor’s habits. 

Because it meant the man still cared, at least a very little. 

00

They are in the middle of a shouting match when the Gang shows up. Albeit one distinctly one-sided in nature. Bell has never been the sort of man to raise his voice, let alone exchange heated words in anger, and Doyle is beginning to feel like a blustering schoolboy when the bottle of acid is thrown at their feet. 

The doctor had entered his lab from the usual side door, pausing for only a moment at the sight of Arthur perched firmly against the cabinet where the man always stored his lesson supplies. It was Bell’s last lecture of the day, and the doctor was as meticulous with his tools as he was with his schedule. 

Bell worked around this nicely by heading to the sink to wash up. Arthur set his teeth in frustration, and opted for the offensive. 

If he attempted to outlast the doctor patience for patience, they would be here until the second coming. 

“Innes misses you.” It was a low blow, delivered swiftly and cleanly, intended to bite. Still, Arthur felt no satisfaction in the slump of the doctor’s shoulders, the bend of his neck, as if a great weight rested there, unseen and eternally unmoving.  
Doyle waited for a moment, then another and another. It was the ticking of the wall clock that finally snapped his patience however, his steps rapid, his breathe laboured, as he crossed the distance between them, and dared to do something he never dreamed of being necessary before. 

Even now, something stops his fingers millimeters from the doctor’s shoulder, the urge to spin the man around and shake him fleeing as quickly as it had come. 

This is not a young Arthur before him, and Doyle is not his own father. Violence is not the answer. Arthur’s hand brushes the back of Bell’s jacket just the slightest amount, as it falls gracelessly to his side. 

There is no victory in the flinch this elicits, no swell of triumph in Arthur’s breast as the doctor finally, finally turns to face him. 

The grief etched into the man’s face is like a nail in his heart. How could he ever suppose, even for a moment, that this man did not care for him, for his little brother?

Shame slammed across Arthur’s face, his cheeks reddening of their own accord, and the part of him that has considered throwing himself before a passing carriage, just enough to be lightly trampled, simply so he could wake up aching and broken but with the certain knowledge that when he opened his eyes, Bell would be there at his bedside, that dangerous part of him that knocked back laudanum and gelsemium and any other opiate he could get his hands on, when Innes is safely with their mother and he has no patients to speak of, that part crows with victory that this, this is what finally draws a reaction from the doctor. 

It is of no surprise to Arthur that when Bell finally speaks to him, for the first time in nearly a year, it is an inquiry into his health and well being. “Are you alright Doyle?” 

Incredulous laughter bubbled up in his lungs, spurting out into the stale air of the lab. “What sort of question is that Sir?” There was a hiss with that tone, an indignation, a pain, that he could not quite conceal. It had been a long, long year. And Arthur’s temper always had been his Achilles’ Heel. 

The doctor met the tone head on, his gaze implacable. It might have been eight years, but he was no stranger to Arthur’s piques of temper. 

Sure enough, one arched eyebrow later and Doyle was flushing with shame, as chastened as he had been as a student. 

Doyle somehow found the composure to turn back to the washing of his instruments, seemingly resigned to Arthur’s continued presence, if not exactly welcoming of it. 

“What brings you here Doyle?” 

Arthur clenched his fists, sputtered for a moment, drew in a deep breadth, and answered as calmly as he could, “Warner sent me a telegram.” Bell was a genius, let him figure the rest out. Arthur had scarcely slept the night before. 

Bell paused for but a moment, and Doyle opened his mouth to echo the “What of it?” 

Only for his jaw to hang slack, at the real anger running through what Bell actually said. 

“He should not have summoned you. The situation is most delicate, yes, but it is also fully under control.” Arthur truly did sputter this time. 

“These men have threatened to kill you! Have tried at least twice, according to Warner!”

The doctor did not shrug, Arthur doubted the gesture was in his vocabulary, but he caught the meaning of the silence anyway. 

“You don’t care?!” His voice rose in incredulity. 

Bell turned half around at that, his own tone rising to annoyed. “I would have thought that was none of your concern, Dr. Doyle.” So the doctor had noticed his lack of correspondence. 

Cursing his own cowardice, Arthur tried to make up for it with renewed vigour. 

“So what I am not allowed to care if you live or die simply because I have not written to you for a time!?” 

Bell remained stubbornly silent against the onslaught, prompting Arthur to begin pacing about the lab, even as his rant reached full volume. “May I point out that you yourself have not communicated with me in the same length of time! You never even replied to any of Innes’ telegrams!” Again, a flinch, but Doyle was past noticing. 

“If you are so determined to cut me out of your life, at least have the courtesy to tell me why!”

Bell’s gaze fixes on him at that, as if the statement surprised him somehow, and Arthur is winding up to continue when the clinking of glass reaches both their ears. 

Arthur’s pacing is what saves their lives, in the end, by the doctor’s calculations. His movements frenetic enough to obscure Bell’s stillness, to give their assailants too much of a moving target to accurately aim something as aerodynamically inefficient as a beaker vile full of experimental acid. 

Doyle no longer recalls what he was going to say next, what barb or entreaty or plea he had lined up to win Bell over, but it no longer mattered. For he had his answer. 

As with all things Bell, actions had always spoken louder than words. And one could not get much louder than the almighty crash of the doctor physically hauling Arthur backwards onto the cabinets lining the back wall, the only permanent fixture in the room strong enough to support both their weight. The doctor is not a young man, and Doyle is both too stunned and in too much pain to truly register their surroundings during the scramble, but he has no doubt that Bell just saved both their lives, yet again. 

And there again is his answer, in the sinewy strength of the doctor’s grip on his face, his shouts of “Doyle? Are you alright? Arthur!” blasting straight through his ears into his brain. It’s the most beautiful pain Arthur has ever felt. 

The doctor cares. 

He later blames the shock, then the fumes from the acid, but somehow it seems appropriate to reply to Bell’s frantic inquiries and gentle peeling back of his eyelids with a breathy chuckle, “Evidently I should have listened more closely to Warner’s description of precisely what kind of weapons this gang was smuggling.” Bell blinked at him, his eyebrows puckered in confusion. 

Yet there was a light in his eyes that had been dark for so long, Doyle had all but forgotten its existence. And when he patted Arthur’s cheek lightly and reached for his burning ankles with a hearty, “Come Doyle, help me with these shoes of yours,” somehow, Arthur knew everything would indeed be alright. 

00

He awakens to the softness of a down comforter. And promptly sneezes. 

Doyle is mildly allergic to duck down. A fact which is known to only two people in the world, and Arthur feels something seize in his chest, because the doctor would never make a mistake like this. 

He sits up with a painful jolt, “Bell!” 

“Easy doctor Doyle,” firm hands press on his shoulders, and Doyle blinks rumpled hair and sleep out of his eyes enough to make out… “Warner?” 

His tone is just a tad past incredulous. The Inspector looks distinctly domestic in his shirt sleeves. There is a short nod of reply, the man turning towards the side table in search of something. 

A cup is pressed into his hand, and Doyle chokes on the taste of weak tea with just a dash of jasmine, because that was Bell’s wife’s favourite blend, the one the doctor always carries in his bag, just to have the smell close to him. 

One learns the oddest things about one’s companions while on the hunt for a long vanished serial killer. 

Spluttering, he coughed out a weak inquiry, “Where’s Bell?” His fear must have shown in his voice, or perhaps his face, because Warner chose reassurance over patting his back ineffectually against the spluttering coughs. 

“Not to worry Doyle, he’s fine. He’s refused to leave your side these many hours, so the wife has him in the kitchen getting a bite to eat.” Warner chuckled fondly, “Martha practically had to force in out at gun point to shift him from your bedside.” 

Arthur fell back again a pillow-cotton, by the smell, and there was the doctor’s touch at work-, exhausted, his head throbbing in time with his feet. That acid had packed a mean punch. 

He found the breath for another question, somehow, “Why are we-“ Warner cut him off, “At my wife’s sister’s?” Oh right, Warner lived in South Sea. Arthur knew there was something odd about all this. Come to think of it, what had the man been doing in Edinburgh in the first place-

Warner replaced the teacup on the end table with a sigh. “That gang we’ve been following firebombed the doctor’s place around the same time you were attacked in the lab.” At Doyle’s look of alarm, he hastened to tack on a slightly reassuring, “Oh, it’s alright, there was only light damage. Fortunately, this lot is better at small time assassination than they are at home invasions,” Incredibly, the man followed that up with a chuckle. 

“Most of the windows will have to be replaced though, so the doctor elected to bring you here when I volunteered it.” Over the hospital, Doyle surmised, which must mean… “Are Innes and my mother alright?” 

Bell chose that moment to materialize in the doorway, his bag in one hand, his feet bare and arms full of an apparently duck feather free duvet. 

“They are quite alright Doyle, I sent young Clarkey to deliver your brother safely here, and your mother is on her way to her sister’s in Devon.” Arthur breathed a sigh of relief, followed by a quieter, more private one. It had been nearly five years since he had communicated with his mother in any manner besides written correspondence. Her decision to place father "in the mad house” not quite as galling to her oldest son as her continued insistence on calling it that in front of his little brother. There was a reason his sisters had married early, just as there was a reason Innes spent more time in England with Arthur these days, or even with Bell, than he ever did at home. 

The doctor nodded as if in answer to his thoughts, then turned to Warner with a perfunctory air, “Come Inspector, make yourself useful and help me change this coverlet. Goose down never has agreed with Doyle.” His feet were blazing in time with his head, and Innes was no doubt mere minutes from bouncing into their lives like an overeager puppy, but in that moment, as Bell intoned a strident, “Mind his bandages!” Arthur felt more content than he had in months. 

And as he drifted off to sleep, as Bell’s hand brushed the coverlet up to his chin, Arthur found the courage to let himself reach out a searching hand for the doctor.  
And he found the courage to hold on, when he received an answer. 

00

As weapons’ traffickers went, their lot was far from the pick of the litter Arthur decided. It had been nearly three weeks since the attack in the lab, and their little party had long since decamped back to Bell’s establishment, Innes trailing Bell and Arthur’s push chair with all the bubbly intensity of a boy whose world was once again spinning on the correct axis. 

Still, incompetently designed or not, the acid had served to render his feet next to useless for some weeks yet to come, the painful burns giving way to equally painful-and infinitely more dangerous-blisters and welts that oozed puss in the most inconvenient places. It was altogether an unpleasant experience, if not exactly a life-threatening one. 

“Ouch!” Bell paused in his careful bandaging of Arthur’s ankle, his languid eyes searching his patient’s face for the source of his discomfort. “Everything alright Doyle?” His voice was soft, but Arthur caught the undercurrent of worry coursing through the tone. 

It struck him many times in the last few months that whatever other motive Bell had had for uttering those damning words all those months ago, selfishness had never been one of them. 

“Cast all memory of these events from your mind. Cast them from your mind Doyle.” 

In other words, forget the doctor. Before he succeeded in getting Doyle killed. 

Arthur has not spoken to his mother in almost six years, since the day she finally caved to reason and had his violent, insane, and abusive father committed to an asylum. He is no stranger to the kind of damage grief and guilt can do to the most intimate of relationships. 

“Doctor…” Arthur trailed off, words failing him. Bell met his gaze, his eyes soft and warm and fond, “What is it Doyle?” That phrase comes with so much baggage, so much history between them. Doyle swallows hard. He is so very sick of losing people. 

“Thank you for letting us stay here.” Bell’s eyes softened yet further, his voice just the slightest touch of thick, just this side of choked up, “You are most welcome Doyle.” 

Later, morphine carefully injected, bandages in place, lights dimmed and non-duck comforter turned down, Bell pauses at Doyle’s bedside for a moment, his hand hesitating in the air, before raising decisively from the coverlet to tenderly stroke through Doyle’s thick hair. 

“Sleep well…Arthur.” The tears, when they come, are brushed away by fingers as steady and sure as the rivers of memory somehow tell him they should be. 

00

Neither of them ever apologize for the Year of Silence, as Innes playfully refers to it. He seems to regard the whole thing as a grand adventure, as only the carefree assurance of the young could, secure in the knowledge that both the adults in his life care for each other as much as they care for him. 

Innes is too young to remember a time Joseph Bell was not a part of their lives. Arthur often envies him that luxury. 

No, indeed Bell never mentions it again, and neither does Doyle. Some things are best left in the past. 

Bell accompanies the Doyle brothers on their next visit to their father, two years to the day since their last. He stands at the back of the visiting room, his hands steady on Innes’ shoulders, for all the lad has finally begun to spring up in height. But then, the doctor has always been a reassuringly tall man. 

Arthur watches them fondly for a moment, before bracing himself and turning to face the husk that is all that remains of a father he barely remembers ever being truly whole. 

It goes as well as can be expected, which is to say poorer than Arthur had hoped. 

Innes is a slumped, dejected figure on the drive back, Bell a reassuring weight between the brothers. Arthur draws strength from the gloved hand squeezing his knee, and presses down on his heels until he can feel the puckered scars of blisters long tended to. 

And finds the courage to look his little brother in the eye, and tell him about their father. 

“Father loved to paint. Did I ever tell you that...”

00

He writes a letter to his mother, after that visit. He receives no reply. 

Some things truly are better left in the past. 

00

“Arfour, come play with us!” Doyle had always performed abysmally at Cricket. Rugby was far more his game. Grimacing, he took another sip of Mrs. William’s admittedly excellent tea, and turned to meet his little brother’s eager gaze. 

It is a beautiful summer day, Innes a strapping fourteen, catching up to Arthur’s height in leaps and bounds. To call the back garden behind the house in South Sea small is to pay the builders an enormous compliment in Doyle’s opinion, but this appears to have done nothing to dampen Bell’s enthusiasm for the game. Still in his customary black suit, the doctor has somehow managed to out bowl the youngest Doyle at every turn.  
Bell thumps the bat on the ground, a challenging eyebrow raised in his direction. 

“Come along Doyle, the honour of Scotland is at stake!” 

There are days when Arthur wonders what kind of father Bell had made. 

Snatching up the cricket ball that has just been chucked at his feet by his overeager brother, Arthur lofts it experimentally into the air, and meets the doctor’s expression dead on. 

The smile is as earnest as it is wide. “Come along Arthur, don’t keep us waiting now lad.” 

And then there are days where he does not have to wonder at all. 

The bat hits the ball with a crack, and Innes jumps up and down with a shriek, the doctor’s laughter around rumbling the terraced garden. 

Arthur sputters out an indignant laugh, and launches himself at his giggling brother. 

“Be careful now lads!” 

Days rather like today. 

 

00

It was quiet. Eerily so in fact. The banging had ceased some time ago, leaving in its wake an uneasy cessation of all outward sounds. 

Below them, the sizzle and hiss of the acid soaked floor provided the only sound to their impromptu imprisonment. 

Arthur felt the Doctor shift slightly, the reassuring bulk of his shoulder pressing closer to Arthur’s own. A long-fingered hand remained clasped around his wrist, periodically shifting position to best feel the pulse points. 

Arthur scarcely dared to breath. Not for fear of their still unnamed assailants, as sure as he was that they had far from heard the last of them, but rather because Bell was here, right beside him. 

It had been so long since the doctor had been still in Arthur’s presence, let alone the nearly contented quiet that lulled over them both, despite their precarious perch over the specimen cabinets, socks and shoes long since abandoned to the corrosive floor below them, limbs curled tightly to their persons, brushing in a most intimate manner in many instances. 

Speaking of highly intimate, Arthur would have been appalled at his own forthrightness for what he dared to utter next. Would have, if their current predicament was even a hair less dire. 

Would have, if it had not been eleven months since Bell had deigned to communicate with him in anything more sophisticated than telegrams to Innes. 

Would have, if the words were any less true. Any less heartfelt. 

“I have missed you Sir. Very much.” His voice cracked, but Arthur made no move to clear his chocked throat. 

A sharp breath and a suddenly tensed arm were all the indication Arthur had that he had been heard. Silence reigned again. 

Then, a flurry of movement, sure hands and silent gestures, ending with Arthur facing towards Bell just enough to be captured by the doctor’s piercing gaze. How he had missed that look, soul piercing calculation, mixed with unquenchable fondness. 

The words, when they come, are not what he expected. But then, nothing about this situation is what either of them expected. 

“Did I ever tell you about my son Doyle?” 

Arthur suspects his jaw dropped slightly. He had known, intellectually, that the doctor had had a son. Had seen the pictures about his office, the subtle engraving on a treasured watch chain. 

He knew the boy had been scarcely older than Arthur himself, that he had died serving the crown, for all that illness had stolen him away before a bullet could. 

He knew that, the same way he knew Bell’s wife had died hardly a year before he met the doctor. They were facts, the facts of Joseph Bell, as immutable as his height or his piercing blue eyes. 

Arthur had honestly never thought about them that much. Their lives or their deaths. They just were.  
Looking back, he supposed such assumptions here inevitable, when one considered the private life of their eminent professor. Even when that professor became an equally revered mentor. Perhaps even more so then. 

But then, Arthur reflected ruefully, gazing at Bell’s wedding ring where it rested against the edge of his own wrist, the fingers that bore it warm and firm, most mentors did not buy their mentees little brothers deer stalkers. 

Perhaps, Bell was not the only one guilty of failing to properly account for what their relationship actually consisted of these days. Perhaps. Arthur is unsure. 

He has never been terribly good with family matters. 

The doctor is a patient man, but Arthur has kept him waiting more than long enough. If this is an olive branch, he has every intention of holding onto it for as long as he can possibly manage. 

His eyes met the doctor’s, and held. He breathed out a painful breath, and started at the beginning. “What was his name?”

And listening to the soft cadence of the doctor’s voice, feeling the rise and fall of Bell’s chest, reassuringly calm and steady, Arthur felt himself begin to relax for the first time since Daniel Blaney blew his brains out before their very eyes, nearly a year ago to the day. 

They were locked in a morgue, there were potentially deadly criminals holding them hostage, and acid had eaten his last pair of clean socks, but somehow, in this moment, all was once again right in Arthur Doyle’s world. 

For it was once again a world that included Dr. Joseph Bell of Edinburgh University. 

Arthur fully planned to keep it that way. This time, and all the times after that. For as long as he could manage it.


End file.
